What is Learning Management System? | How Does It Work

In today's digital landscape, companies worldwide are embracing the power of eLearning or e- Learning as their preferred training delivery method. With the eLearning market experiencing exponential growth of 900% since 2000, organisations recognise the need for a robust Learning Management System (LMS) to facilitate their eLearning initiatives.

An LMS is a sophisticated software solution that empowers businesses to effortlessly create, deploy, and monitor training programs for their employees and stakeholders. But what exactly is an LMS, and how does it operate? Let's delve into how forward-thinking companies leverage LMS technology to design comprehensive learning experiences for their workforce and broader ecosystems.

What is the Purpose of an LMS?

An LMS functions similarly to word processors like Microsoft Word or email servers like Gmail. It allows businesses to develop, manage, and deliver eLearning courses seamlessly. The acronym LMS stands for Learning Management System, comprising three key components:

Learning

As an LMS is designed to deliver training programs, it caters to various learning needs and objectives.

Management

An LMS assists in organising and managing course content efficiently.

System

The software platform provides feedback, enabling progress tracking and targeted improvements.

What Are the Components of an LMS?

The structure of a Learning Management System consists of two main components:
The initial segment is an administrative interface training managers utilise to organise their learning programs through various back-office tasks. This includes designing, administering, and disseminating courses, managing learners, analysing reports, and automating notifications, among other functionalities.

The second component is an eLearning module, serving as a visually appealing user interface. Like a mobile app or web-browser platform, similar to popular applications like Gmail or Facebook, the eLearning module is the gateway learners encounter when enrolling in or being assigned to a course.

So, what are the exact functions of an LMS?

Let's delve into the precise capabilities of an LMS. An LMS empowers you to:

● Generate: Develop online lessons (eLearning content) that can be combined to create comprehensive courses.

● Assign: Automatically assign or provide access to your employees, partners, customers, or the general public.

● Track: Monitoring and managing your training audience is crucial. You can effortlessly track their progress and maintain evaluation reports.

Who Are the Primary Users of an LMS?

An LMS is utilised by a diverse range of organisations involved in delivering eLearning courses, extending beyond educational institutions.

Here are several examples of entities that leverage a learning management system (LMS) for training purposes:

- Enterprises of all sizes, ranging from prominent global corporations to small and medium-sized businesses

- Healthcare organisations, financial institutions, customer service and contact centres, among others

- Government agencies, both national and regional, including the United Nations and local government offices

- Non-profit organisations and non-governmental organisations (NGOs)

- Consulting firms providing specialised services

- Academic institutions such as schools, universities, and colleges

- Online educational platforms and eLearning-based institutions

- Independent coaches and teachers

The versatility of a Learning Management System becomes evident in its ability to cater to diverse training requirements. Subject matter experts can employ an LMS to deliver online courses, train internal staff, and consulting firms can effectively educate their clients on various subjects.

How Does an LMS Help Different Roles?

An LMS supports a variety of learning activities, as evident by the 'L' in its acronym. As such, it has emerged as an indispensable tool for businesses of all sizes. Here's how an LMS benefits different roles within an organization:

Training Employees:

Continuous employee training is essential regardless of your industry - insurance, manufacturing, healthcare, or government. Whether compliance training or upskilling existing staff, a corporate LMS enables employees to learn at their own pace, eliminating disruptions associated with traditional learning methods.

By utilising an LMS for eLearning, you can save time and money on staff training instead of hiring professional instructors for conventional seminars. Integrated monitoring and reporting features provide valuable insights into employee growth.

Onboarding New Hires:

Streamline and automate the critical onboarding process with a corporate LMS. While personal greetings and office tours remain essential, most necessary information can be conveniently accessed and referred to in the learning material at the new hires' convenience.
New employees often need help remembering details about a company's history or compliance procedures. However, an online onboarding course ensures constant access to relevant information.
Your LMS effectively educates new employees about employee conduct codes, privacy policies, and anti-discrimination/harassment policies within your organisation. Additionally, it can provide insights into job responsibilities, career advancement prospects, and rewards.

Preserving Your Employees' Knowledge:

Your staff's skills are undeniably vital, but it's equally important to learn from them. Retaining critical skills, techniques, and information within your organisation becomes crucial when employees depart or retire.
Rather than allowing essential knowledge to languish in an overlooked document management system, an LMS platform is the perfect solution. It is a knowledge repository where you can store valuable employee expertise in a structured format for future reference.
Therefore, you must consider an LMS as a long-term investment to safeguard your company's future.

How Does an LMS Work?

It'll be time to start developing your learning environment once you've chosen the ideal LMS for your training needs. You usually go through the following procedures before commencing a training programme.

Build your eLearning course. You must first add your eLearning content to your LMS before you can deliver it.

You can do this by either producing new course material (i.e., composing the content of your courses inside the LMS) or adding current material (a Word document, a PowerPoint presentation, Wikipedia articles, etc.).

An advanced LMS software, such as PlayAblo, allows you to add course material from various sources and formats.

Another essential element of course development is the ability to easily include internet assets (ranging from YouTube videos and Wikipedia pages to online presentations and tweets), enabling you to reap the benefits of the plethora of information available on digital platforms.

Organise your lessons. The next step is to put your eLearning courses in order.

Doing this might be as simple as offering a single course or as complex as releasing many courses across multiple branches for departments and learner groups.

It all relies on your organisation's needs and structure. The finest learning management systems should allow you to structure your eLearning courses in any way you desire.

For example, in PlayAblo, you may combine various organisational options (courses, groups, categories, skills, branches, and so on) to give you complete control over how you offer your lessons. Whether you're a multinational with 20 locations or a tiny firm in a single city, we can help.

Educate your learners. You're ready to give your courses to your learners after you've prepared and structured them.

Again, how you go about it is determined by your company's needs and structure.

For example, your courses could be designed for a specific audience, such as internal staff training. Alternatively, they could be made available to a broader audience, either for free (as in an NGO teaching specific skills to people in underdeveloped communities) or for a fee (e.g., an online school offering web-based learning courses).

A modern learning management system (LMS) should be able to handle all of these scenarios, allowing you to serve and manage small and large groups of learners, offer restricted or open enrolment, and simply interface with your existing payment gateways to process paid courses.

With adaptable user interfaces, touch-friendly interactivity, and offline access modes, the finest LMS platforms should be able to cater to mobile devices as well.

How to Manage LMS Users?

Organise Your Users

The "M" in LMS stands for the ability to manage courses and users.
Let's look at how an LMS can assist you in managing your users now that we've covered course management.
First of all, there will be three types of users. Depending on the LMS you choose, these users may have different names. However, in general, they are:

1. Administrators are the individuals in charge of setting up and configuring the LMS.

2. Instructors or Facilitators are the ones in charge of planning lessons and keeping track of learner progress.

3. Finally, the people who consume the courses are known as Learners.

The administrator and instructor may be the same individual in a tiny firm or organisation. After all, setting up a user-friendly LMS like PlayAblo is no more complicated than setting up a Facebook account.
Employees (if you work for a company, a major organisation, a government agency, or a private company) or learners enrolled in your courses are examples of learners (if you work in the educational sphere).

What Does Managing These Users Entail?

Adding them to the LMS, allocating courses to them, communicating with them as an instructor, choosing what kind of information they are authorised to read, issuing tests, and tracking their progress (if you're selling courses), etc. A decent LMS makes these processes less tedious by automating repetitive actions and allowing you to make changes and updates to several items simultaneously.

Keeping Track of Progress

Keep track of and evaluate the progress of your learners. The ability to measure and monitor learner progress in real-time is one of the most critical capabilities an LMS provides (and a huge time saver).

An LMS gives you automated and rapid access to course enrolment figures, attendance records, learner grades, and many other performance measures, whether you have 10 or 10,000 learners.

Real-time alerts and notifications should be included in the top LMSs. An automated notice, for example, informs the learner when a new course has been allocated to them or when a LIVE session is ready to begin.

Reporting — the capacity to query and display data in graphs and charts so you can immediately notice patterns or anomalies — is another requirement for advanced LMS platforms.

For example, PlayAblo allows you to filter learner and course information in a variety of ways (for example, "show me just learners from department X enrolled in class A," or "show me this learner's test results"). Aggregated statistics are also available, which you can export in an Excel-compatible format.

Evaluating an LMS/What LMS Is Best For You?

EVALUATION -To evaluate which LMS is ideal for your firm, use the steps below to conduct market research:

1. Determine the Most Critical Aspects of Your Unique Set-up

You want to invest in the ideal LMS. However, what is excellent for one organisation may not be suitable for another. So, based on your requirements, you must first differentiate must-haves from nice-to-haves.

Consider the following scenario:
If you do not have an internal IT team dedicated to setting up and maintaining your system, you must strongly consider opting for a user-friendly SaaS or cloud-based LMS.
If you're on a restricted budget, check for LMSs that offer various price plans and pick the one with the most basic functionality.
Choose an LMS that allows you to design unique training programmes for each department, client, or branch while still using the same account.
Check which LMSs allow your preferred payment systems and provide marketing-related tools if you're selling (or plan to sell) online courses.
Choose an LMS with a robust reporting package if you want to keep track of your learning.

2. Ask for Client References

Speak to your shortlisted LMS vendors’ customers to hear what they have to say about the software and particularly the support experience. These conversations will give you insights into what the users liked and didn't like about the LMS platform.
Also, look at or ask for case studies. These credentials are usually available on the LMS website. Watch out for businesses that are similar to your size and sector. This check can indicate that the LMS is a suitable fit for you as well.
Prioritise your precise requirements, must-haves, and deal-breakers when reading evaluations and testimonies. Compare the different LMS platforms based on time to go live, for example, if you want to start utilising your LMS as soon as feasible.

3. Try It Out for Free

Some LMS providers provide free trials. A free trial is advantageous since you will test the product before committing to a pricing plan.
You'll determine whether the system satisfies all of your requirements, how simple it is to use (for example, creating courses and assigning new users), and whether you have any technical issues that you'd like to discuss with the support team.
After you've thought about everything, make a shortlist of 2-3 LMS platforms and choose the one that checks the most of your high-priority criteria.
For a more detailed and thorough strategy on evaluating the right LMS please read: 9 Questions to Ask Your Vendor Before Selecting an LMS.

What Are the Most Important LMS Features?

We have covered the meaning of a Learning Management System (LMS) and its purpose. The next step is to learn about the features that will assist you in achieving your training objectives.

We have covered this topic in complete detail here, listing 20 key LMS features to look for when you are in the market for a new LMS. However, here is a shortlist of the main components to look out for.

You will need these critical elements to improve the learning experiences of your teams and streamline your course management. The LMS user interface can be branded and customised.

Hosting webinars and virtual training sessions allows numerous learners to participate through audio and video.

Gamification possibilities, allowing training managers to set goals and learners to track their progress, earn awards, and even compete with their co-workers.

The mobile-friendly design allows you to utilise your LMS on smartphones and tablets, allowing learners to continue even when they are not connected to the internet.

Data interchange and integration with third-party systems using eLearning standards like SCORM and xAPI.

We highly recommend that you also go through this entire list of Top 20 LMS features for the first-time LMS buyer.

How to Choose the Right LMS for My Company?

Now that you've gotten a solid sense of what an LMS can do for you and the key features to look out for, it is time to put one in your shopping cart. Which one, though? The quick answer is that the finest LMS is one that meets all of your training requirements while remaining within your budget.

Why Choose PlayAblo™ LMS

PlayAblo is a Learning Management System that is designed to help you succeed. Teams embrace training while feeling at ease with an experience that is configurable, easy to manage, and enjoyable to use.

PlayAblo is trusted by several teams of different shapes, sizes, and industries all around the world because it is:

- Simple to use (both for learners and administrators)
- Budget-friendly
- Ready to use right out of the box (and can be set up in as little as one day!)
- Support for Mobile devices, such as phones and tablets.
- Easy to personalise

Ask us for our consumer references and learn what they have to say about PlayAblo. Alternatively, sign up for a free account today to experience for yourself how PlayAblo can assist you in achieving your training objectives.

What Do You Mean by an LMS ?